New BBC Three documentary reveals how youngsters are using social media to score and sell illegal substances
CHILDREN as young as fifteen are making up to £300-a-DAY selling drugs on social media - using EMOJIS.
An eight-week investigation by BBC Three programme Stacey Dooley Investigates blows the lid on the UK's underage drug trade - and reveals that Class As are just a text away.
In the show, 30-year-old Stacey cracks the emoji 'code' and sets up fake social media profiles to buy drugs - and is offered cocaine and highly addictive methamphetamine, known as crystal meth.
Stacey goes to meet one of these digital dealers, and comes faced-to-face with a 15-year-old in his school uniform.
Meeting outside Maidstone train station, 'Denver' tries to sell her seven pills of MDMA - before backtracking and claiming they're just "mints".
He later admits: "I just wanted the money."
Another babyfaced dealer is 16-year-old Tai who she travels to Croydon to meet after setting up a deal on Snapchat.
Again outside the station, he offers her six pills of MDMA - and opens up about why he's spending more time shotting drugs than studying for his GCSEs.
He says: "The money is addictive" adding he uses it to "buy clothes. Go out. Enjoy my life."
Stacey asks if adults are forcing him to sell drugs, which he denies.
Tai says: "I’m a kid so kids know me, and kids that do their thing do their thing. So kids come to me to get their thing.
"So when I’m grown up I’m not gonna be selling to little kids… but I am a little kid and I sell these things and all these people that want it they gonna come.
"It’s not my fault that they want it.”
He does admit there's an adult involved though, adding: "My guy just has everything.
";So I can go to him, when I have people who want what, like what they want, I go to him."
Stacey also visits a safe-house used by one of Britain's largest drug gangs, where she sees a shipment of liquid cocaine from South America being cooked up ready to be sold.
While there, she's told by one of the gang leaders that it's possible for one of his crew to make £26,000 in TWO DAYS due to the demand and quick turnover for product.
Explaining that "75 percent" of deals now happen through social media, they add: "It’s the younger generation’s game now, it’s the kids on the Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram."
New teen dating app Yellow is also blamed for making it easier for youngsters to buy and sell drugs, although they - along with Snapchat and Instagram - claim that they are policing their platforms as best as they can by giving users more tools to report unsuitable and illegal content.
Stacey concludes; “I fear is it is going to take something very tragic to happen to these kids before Yellow, Instagram and Snapchat wake up and take action.
"Until then it will continue to be a drug dealers’ paradise.”
While teens are using emojis to buy drugs, some of us are getting the totally wrong end of the stick and using them all wrong.
And last year, a snake breeder revealed a python born with three smiley faces on its skin.
Watch Stacey Dooley Investigates: Kids Selling Drugs Online on the .
